The JEWISH Vayeishev • Nov. 30, 2018 • 22 Kislev, 5779 • Torah columns pages 26–27 • Luach page 26 • Vol 17, No 46
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The loathsome symbol of all the world’s woes View from Central Park
tehilla r. goldberg
W
hat a painful week. The ugly tentacles of anti-Semitism came out from all directions. Before the news of Airbnb’s boycott of Jewish apartments in Judea and Samaria, before the bloodcurdling chanting at UCLA of “Intifada!” “Intifada!” — a call to murder Jews in Israel —
before all that, I came across a short video by the well-known thinker and author Yossi Klein Halevy. He’s been on a campus tour discussing his recent book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. A student at DePaul University in Chicago asked Halevy why “humanizing” Zionists was acceptable. The student compared the humanizing of Zionists to asking African Americans to “humanize” members of the KKK. Here’s part of Halevy’s on-the-spot response: “Those who traffic in that kind of language are on very thin ice. My understanding of antiSemitism is the following: Anti-Semitism is not simply hating the Other, the Jew as Other. Anti-
Semitism works a little bit differently. What antiSemitism does is turn the Jews, the Jew, into the symbol of whatever it is that a given civilization defines as its most loathsome qualities. And so, under Christianity before the Holocaust, and the Vatican too, the Jew was the Christ killer — his blood be upon our heads and upon our children’s heads. Under communism, the Jew was the Capitalist. Under Nazism, the Jew was the race polluter, the ultimate race polluter. “Now we live in a different civilization, where the most loathsome qualities are racism, colonialism, apartheid. And lo and behold, the greatest offender in the world today — with all the
beautiful countries of the world — is the Jewish state. The Jewish state is THE symbol of the genocidal racist apartheid state. That’s Israel. That’s the Jewish state. “An Israeli political philosopher, named Yaakov Talmon, once put it this way: ‘The state of the Jews has become the Jew of the State.’ What that means to me is, criticism of Israel is not antiSemitism. Criticism of Israel’s right to existence, denying Israel the right to exist, calling Israel the Zionist Entity, that is anti-Semitism. That is a classical continuity of thousands of years of symbolizing ‘the Jew.’ So, using that kind of lanSee The world’s woes on page 29